


Wilderness of Forms

by mombasas



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Hopeful Ending, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Prophetic Dreams, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 17:53:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14676351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mombasas/pseuds/mombasas
Summary: Even though the fight is over, Tony's dreams don't stop.“You know the story of Cassandra?”Tony looked away. “Leave it, Nat.”“She was cursed with the gift of prophecy,” Natasha continued. He could feel her steady gaze.“Not much of a gift,” Tony said at last.“Not for her, no.”(Spoilers for Infinity War)





	Wilderness of Forms

**Author's Note:**

> quick & dirty not-quite-a-fix-it.

The hours after the fight blurred together stickily, each one passing into the next at uneven speed. The nanoadhesive he’d applied to the wound in his chest had begun to fail, and blood dripped thickly onto Titan’s dusty surface. One of his lungs was collapsing. Nebula half-dragged him into the Milano, one metal-plated fist clenched in the material of his jacket. He lost consciousness to the sound of The Jackson 5, only to be awoken by a throbbing pain on his cheek. Nebula had punched him.

“Wake up. You’re not allowed to die,” she ordered, wadding up what looked like a sweater and pressing it to his wound so hard that his vision swam. “You heard what the wizard said.”

 _Congratulations_ , Strange had drawled. _You’re a prophet._

“It’s the only way,” she continued. “He traded the stone for your life. Thanos traded my _sister_ for—it has to be worth something. You _have_ to be worth something.” An edge of desperation sharpened her flat, mechanical voice. Tony didn’t call her on it. He passed out again, instead. Outside, the galaxy flashed by in an unending stream of light.

She roused him again when they landed, the hatch lowering to let in the bright Wakandan sunlight. Tony spat blood onto the floor of the spacecraft less because he wanted to and more because his mouth was full of it. The sun made his eyes water. It was bristling with spears and guns.

“You are a huge pain in my ass,” Nebula told him, pulling one of his arms over her shoulder and wrapping her arm around his waist like an iron band. “Get it together.”

On the ground, feet planted and weapons up, surrounded by Dora Milaje: Rhodey, Bruce, Natasha. Steve.

“’S this it?” Tony asked numbly, or thought he did. He couldn’t hear his voice over the roaring in his ears, or feel its vibration through the sucking feeling in his chest. His wet eyes kept catching on Steve, Steve’s blank face, its complete lack of expression. His wet hands kept catching on his side, pressing the useless sodden fabric against it. Then Nebula’s unyeilding body was gone and Rhodey was gripping his shoulders. “Peter,” he said, or tried to. “Peter.” Tony was sagging, Rhodey turned away above him, saying something urgently. The sun was in his eyes. Steve was there, face empty, his hands shaking just as hard as Tony’s.

 

 

He spent two days in Wakanda’s understaffed hospital, some kind of biobed whirring around his chest.

“Tony,” Rhodey said, when he opened his eyes for the first time. “Pepper—she—”

“I know,” Tony said, and found that he did. Had known for hours, maybe days.

His own voice: _Are you sure? It felt real. It felt so real._

There were more, of course. Half a universe more. One of the Wakandan nurses had given him a tablet with a list of the dead. An international database.

“They are calling it the Book of Dust,” he said, tapping at the holographic interface that monitored Tony’s newly-regenerated lung tissue. “Take a deep breath for me please, Mr. Stark. Good. Now hold it.”

 

 

In the evenings, Tony dreamed. It felt particularly cruel that, in a world that had changed so irrevocably, so instantly, so completely, his dreams remained unaltered, the same as they had been for nearly six years. After the Battle of New York his nights had been full of star-glitter and the rasping of his own thin breath, the flickering of lights as the helmet’s HUD lost power and shuddered out. After Sokovia, they’d shown him the grit of a darkened battlefield and Steve’s choked voice in his ear, echoing over and over again. _Why didn’t you do more?_ And now, just five days after Thanos’s attack, it was Peter’s voice instead, pleading where Steve’s had been accusatory, regretful where Steve’s had been angry. _I’m sorry_ , he told Tony, night after night. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

He’d tried explaining it to Bruce once.

“They’re different, all the time. They’re—I see different things. But it’s the same dream.”

“What, like déjà vu?”

“Yes! No. Okay. It’s like, one night I’ll dream about the, uh. The wormhole, right?”

“Right.”

“And then the next night, it’ll be everyone dead. You’ve got all of these spears sticking out of you.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because! Bruce, my brain thinks they’re the _same dream_. It’s like I’m having the same nightmare _every single night_. You don’t think that’s a little weird?” 

“…Do you want Lunesta? Or Ambien? Because I can’t prescribe that, Tony, you need a medical doctor—”

 

 

The day before he was released, he added Peter’s name to the Book. It had a simple UI. Name, date of birth, country, last known address. Photograph optional. May’s name was already there and he linked them together. Other names had an entire network around them, a spiderweb of missing people radiating outwards in complex electronic strands.

Peter’s name only had May, a single line like a tightrope connecting them.

Tony found Pepper’s and stared at her headshot for an unknowable number of minutes, long enough that the room became abruptly too close around him. He made it halfway down the hallway before he was forced to stop, lightheadedness making the tiled floor swim. Sinking down onto a bench, he clenched his fists into the material of the white scrub pants he was wearing and tried to breathe as the world spun in and out of view. His chest burned dully.

When his vision finally cleared, Natasha was there, blonde and perched on the bench beside him. There was an ugly scrape across her jaw, pink at the edges where the skin was healing. Her left arm was wrapped in bandages up to the shoulder. It was a long time before she spoke.

“You know the story of Cassandra?”

Tony looked away. “Leave it, Nat.”

“She was cursed with the gift of prophecy,” Natasha continued. He could feel her steady gaze.

“Not much of a gift,” Tony said at last.

“Not for her, no.”

 

 

The dream rolled out ahead of him, night after night after night, like an inescapable chasm. Peter’s wide eyes, resigned. His Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. His knees buckling, face pale while his healing factor tried helplessly to compensate. The sensation of dust under Tony’s hands, under his nails. The taste of it in his mouth. In his throat. In his lungs. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._ And then, _help me._

“It’s not right,” he told Rhodey.

“What?”

“The dream. It’s not—it feels different. I thought it was the same one, but it isn’t. Light’s wrong.”

“Tones, you’re not making sense.”

“I know. I know.” He took a shuddering breath, shallower than he wanted. “I can’t fix this, Rhodey.”

“No one’s asking you to. _No one_ could fix it, Tony, you can’t—”

“I have to,” Tony said, voice raw. They were in one of Shuri’s labs, eerily empty while she worked in the palace. He batted aside a red-flashing memo in frustration. “Why else would Strange—why else would I—”

“What, you want a, a reason for the snap?”

“No. I know why he did it.”

“Then what?”

“I want a reason for why I had to know about it, if nothing I did was going to be enough.”

 

 

_I don’t want to go, sir, please—please, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, Mr. Stark—_

“Mr. Stark!”

Tony’s head jerked up, his gaze snapping to Interim Secretary Garcia’s face, which was fixed in an expression of annoyance. It was clearly not the first time she’d called his name, but as she looked at him, her eyes softened with something like pity.

“Let’s take five, everyone,” she said abruptly. There were assenting murmurs and around him, the holographic projections of the remaining members of the Department of Defense flickered out. “Tony,” she said. “You okay?” She stood, shifting her daughter from her lap to her hip with ease. “You’re a million miles away.”

“Closer to seven thousand, I think.” 

Garcia rolled her eyes but let the question go. “Uh huh. How is Wakanda?”

“Quiet,” Tony said. “Empty.” Garcia’s kid stuffed one pudgy hand into her mouth, gumming at it meditatively. Her dark eyes watched Tony without blinking. There were tiny butterfly clips in her hair.

 

 

The world beyond Wakanda had fractured, ripped cleanly in two and still bleeding at the edges. Between meetings, Tony turned the dream over and over in his mind, worrying at it obsessively like a Rubik’s cube. It was nothing new; he’d been hyperfixated on it for almost a decade, in all its forms—Steve, Peter, the wormhole, Pepper’s outstretched hand. This felt different. There was no action he could take, no wheels he could set in motion. It was over. He had failed.

He couldn’t let it go.

Each morning he woke he rolled the dream between his palms, examining like it was something precious, searching it like a wound. Even Tony hadn’t known what he meant when he spoke to Rhodey, but the longer he thought about it, the more convinced he was. The dream wasn’t right.

There were a dozen things—a hundred, a thousand—that felt wrong. Always, before, it had dragged a pervasive sense of horror with it, one that had him waking drenched in fearsweat and heaving shallowly for breath. Now, he woke with his heart thundering but his mind whirling, scrambling to piece it together. Peter apologized, except when he didn’t. Except when he said _Help me_ , instead. The light was dusky red through Titan’s atmosphere, except when it wasn’t—when it was orange, instead, and crystalline. The dream had always been the truth, playing in an endless loop in his mind’s eye. _You know what’s out there,_ it told him. _Your friends will die. You will survive. You will be alone._ Absolute truth: a calculation worked out so perfectly that there was no alternative, no matter how many adjustments he made to the formula. But what he dreamed now was false. Peter had gone quietly, awful acceptance stealing over his features. He had never begged, not like that. Never pressed a hand to an invisible wall and beaten at it, never mouthed the words _Fix this_.

Tony didn’t know how. The wrongness sat in his stomach like a stone.

 

 

Wakanda was bright and hot and dry, and it smelled sweetly of guinea grass. Shuri’s voice echoed through the emptied palace and beyond it, strong and clear. Lost on his way to the labs, Tony came across one of the Dora Milaje in an alcove, sobs wrenching their way out of her body so hard it shook. He backed away before she saw him. Outside, the world disintegrated and pieced itself back together daily.

“You don’t get to leave,” Steve bit out one day. On the muted screen behind his shoulder, a Televangelist shouted soundlessly about the Rapture. “Not after—you don’t get to leave me, too.”

 _You left first_ , Tony didn’t say. He thought about Steve, yanked forward through time, shedding entire lives behind him even as he tried to hold on so hard that his fingers left marks. Steve, surviving.

He drew in a breath, feeling the stretch of his still-healing lung. “I’m not leaving,” he said. And then, “I’ve been having this dream.” 

**Author's Note:**

> title from Sir Thomas Browne's _Religio Medici_ : "At the last day, when these corrupted reliques shall be scattered in the wildernesse of formes, and seem to have forgot their proper habits, God by a powerfull voyce shall command them back into their proper shapes."


End file.
